atxcyclist

My late-2008-vintage, head-bunting, household deity. His favorite activities include lording over everyone, reminding us he deserves cheese, and weighting-down laps for extended periods of time. He had to go get his vaccinations this last weekend, and has finally forgiven me.

My late-2008-vintage, head-bunting, household deity. His favorite activities include lording over everyone, reminding us he deserves cheese, and weighting-down laps for extended periods of time. He had to go get his vaccinations this last weekend, and has finally forgiven me.

‘It will keep you safe because if it’s broken you cannot drive’
 
Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in a long time. My entire point is that mirrors work fine, are simple thus more reliable, and BETTER as a safety device because their spontaneous failure rate is an incredibly small fraction of an electronic system. There just isn’t a reasonable argument you or anyone else could make, that validates replacing a mirror with a bunch of electronics.
 
Car parts are not sold at a component level, go to the dealership and try to buy a replacement button for the factory radio in your car, or try to buy a replacement stepper motor for one of the gauges in your dash; You can’t. Those are sold as a complete unit, just like the cameras and whatever body part or display and whatever dash trim part they’re a part of; You’re incredibly naive to think manufacturers have any motivation to make these parts separate, they don’t in all other systems so this one would be no different.
 
I do work on cars and understand how even moderately complex car parts are sold as assemblies, you very clearly don’t know this. You’re just arguing to argue.

This was a fun video to watch, and Jessica is hilarious; LTT has so many genuinely funny people working there, it’s awesome.

A lot of brisket really is overrated, but good brisket is on another level. Also, the ends are the best part as far as I’m concerned and quite a bit drier than the middle, I tend to ask for the ends when I have the option.

There wasn’t any hardware upgrades, I’m talking about upgrading an existing system with Windows 10 directly. I even installed Windows 10 on a machine and then upgraded it to Windows 11 two months later; No bloat on there, it’s actually a faster OS. 
 
I understand why people are annoyed their builds from 2016 cannot be upgraded, the hardware security is what it is, but Windows 11 is not a huge resource hog.
 
 

A Sony STR-DH190 stereo receiver was my last recent tech purchase.
 
After owning it personally since about 2005, and being originally manufactured in 1986, my ADCOM stereo preamp finally had a problem cleaning the potentiometers and re-seating components couldn’t fix. This made me a bit sad because it is really difficult to find new (affordable) equipment with a phono stage these days, but an extremely budget-friendly Sony option exists.
 
It doesn’t offer all the options my ADCOM did, but works with the common type of turntable cartridges, and has the added benefit of remote control, and Bluetooth pairing for my music library on my phone; All the options.
 
Specs claim it has 100w continuous per channel even at an 8ohm load, potent enough for the small room I’m in, and more than enough to drive the Paradigm Titan V4 speakers I use. I don’t know if my old preamp had degraded some even before the problems, but the clarity is admirable for something this value-conscious.
 
For $149 US it was hard to beat. Not sure if anyone will buy my old power amp, but I gave the ADCOM to someone that works on stereos to see if they can fix it, and if so can sell it.
 
 

I have my 2-channel system sorted in my room, but I have a home theater setup in the living room that needs a CD player, so off to eBay I went.
 
Picked-up an older Philips CDC-935 5-disc changer for a song, even has coaxial digital out so I can use the DAC in my receiver. This will mostly be to have something playing while I cook, so not a real critical music experience, but being able to queue-up a few hours of CDs is nice. Seller says it’s tested and working.
 
It is a somewhat risky purchase because it’s being shipped, but eBay offered a 2-year warranty for $5, so it’s covered. Less than $50 shipped with warranty, which is cheaper than a thrift store around here and that has basically no guarantee.

The last infraction I was cited for was a parking ticket back in 2006, so…that probably means something.
 
 
I cannot remember the last time I saw a mirror ripped off of a car, and on a motorcycle I’m checking mirrors of merging cars all the time to see if the person in the car has seen me. I think a few of you are just over-hyping that, it isn’t that common.
 
‘You think mirrors are good so let’s remove some of them’ What type of logic is that? 
 
My vehicle mirrors always stay in place, but I’d know the second I got in the seat because I do look at them. That’s normal, I use them.

They will break, there’s countless failure points compared to a simple mirror. These systems will be dependent on the model of car, so down the line it will make a car unfixable when the parts are no longer available. You can always kludge something to work as a mirror.
 
I would argue that in the last half-century, computerized fuel injection, air bags, and ABS are the only added complexities in cars that were worth the trade-off in repair difficulty. Almost everything else drivers really benefit from (power windows, power locks, power steering, and air-conditioning), came earlier.

The last almost twenty years of car engineering has made the long-term, and even short-term reliability of cars worse, with the added complexity of things like video mirrors and all the radio equipment for tire pressure monitoring. Drivers just don’t need that stuff.

It would here though, someone poor couldn’t afford to get licensed at that cost. I still think it’s over $1,000 US to get through the course, but nowhere near equivalent cost. I went through motorcycle licensing about a decade ago, that’s not one-on-one training but much closer. It was about $300 US and took almost twenty hours. That course builds on a standard driver’s license, they’re teaching you vehicle control rather than what signage is, the idea is that you already have a driver’s license before you take the class.
 
i very much preferred the motorcycle class to driver’s ed, at least learning vehicle control was the main focus.

You’re essentially making the claim that a simple mirror is less reliable than a camera module, controller board, wiring, video controller board, LCD panel, and the power management to run all of that.
 
Safety equipment does no good if it’s not working, and the pile of electronics will always be less reliable than a simple mirror. Your expectation that it’s safer is suspect as well, they both accomplish the same thing yet one is exponentially more prone to failure; The only possible benefit is reduced drag, and it’s not worth the trade-off in reliability.
 
You also don’t seem to understand how car parts work, it will not be just the camera module that gets replaced, it will be the entire, car-model-specific unit that is attached to the side of the car/door panel, or the internal screen that will have a much specificity to the model of car it is. It will probably have body color and/or interior color codes as well, so even more part numbers for each car.
 
Manufacturers almost never make entire system components repairable with sub-system parts like a camera module or controller board. It’s not like if your $4k stereo/navigation unit in a newer car fails, you can buy the internal part to fix it, you have to buy the whole unit from the manufacturer.
 
 

They will break, there’s countless failure points compared to a simple mirror. These systems will be dependent on the model of car, so down the line it will make a car unfixable when the parts are no longer available. You can always kludge something to work as a mirror.
 
I would argue that in the last half-century, computerized fuel injection, air bags, and ABS are the only added complexities in cars that were worth the trade-off in repair difficulty. Almost everything else drivers really benefit from (power windows, power locks, power steering, and air-conditioning), came earlier.

The last almost twenty years of car engineering has made the long-term, and even short-term reliability of cars worse, with the added complexity of things like video mirrors and all the radio equipment for tire pressure monitoring. Drivers just don’t need that stuff.

I have my 2-channel system sorted in my room, but I have a home theater setup in the living room that needs a CD player, so off to eBay I went.
 
Picked-up an older Philips CDC-935 5-disc changer for a song, even has coaxial digital out so I can use the DAC in my receiver. This will mostly be to have something playing while I cook, so not a real critical music experience, but being able to queue-up a few hours of CDs is nice. Seller says it’s tested and working.
 
It is a somewhat risky purchase because it’s being shipped, but eBay offered a 2-year warranty for $5, so it’s covered. Less than $50 shipped with warranty, which is cheaper than a thrift store around here and that has basically no guarantee.

Trombone maintenance stuff. Flexible cleaner to clean the inside of the instrument, grease for the tuning slides and lube for the big slide.

 
Cables. Since I got the Kemper amp, I only used it with headphones. I look forward to rip apart my desk, redo all the cable management and put these cable in there as well. The speaker cable goes from the Kemper to my 4x12 cabinet and the XLR cables go from the Kemper to my audio interface. I'll mostly record the guitar through those XLR cables, but maybe I'll try to record from the cab with my mics sometime too. Honestly though, I just want to jam out on the Kemper with my cab, I like that better than through headphones.

This was a fun video to watch, and Jessica is hilarious; LTT has so many genuinely funny people working there, it’s awesome.

We don’t have social credit scores here. It’s very different and most people realize it’s very different. As a U.S. citizen I can still go buy any of those ‘banned’ books in a bookstore, I still have access to all of the world’s major news sources via the internet; They are not the same, it’s clear you’re extremely biased against the U.S.
 
Also, I can complain about the U.S. government and I don’t get hauled-off to prison, so…you can probably understand why I think your insinuation that they’re similar is not reasonable.
 

In my quest for getting my stereo fully-functional again, I needed a remote for my 1989-vintage Denon DCD-820 CD player. As with many of the audio components I’ve had over the years I bought this at a pawn shop, so no remote. ‘Couldn’t you just go push the buttons on it?’ I can hear the questions now… 
 
No! As much as I like this player, it had one feature I was unaware of: The RCA-type audio outputs on this unit, unlike any other media player like this I’ve had, are actually variable. And wouldn’t you know it those controls exist nowhere on the unit itself, and are instead solely on the remote.
 
I had unplugged this CD player from power for long enough that this setting reset to the factory default, which is about 10% of total output power. But eBay to the rescue, after finding the owners manual online and verifying the model of remote needed, I got one for less than $20 shipped.
 
So far I’ve had Tool, The Police, Genesis, and Rush propelled into my earholes; CD’s are back in business over here.
 
 
 

Just got the album on CD, so actually listening to the entire thing.

Money.
 
Money is the reason bridges and other infrastructure isn’t built and/or maintained like it should be. Paying a structural engineer to inspect a bridge isn’t that much, getting ahead of a catastrophic failure by preemptively replacing gussets, cables, and rivets is very expensive, especially when public perception is ‘road closed = bad’ even though it’s necessary to facilitate that maintenance.
 
The last twenty years of my life I’ve worked in commercial architecture, mostly on medical facilities like hospitals. Even extremely necessary facilities like that have to ‘value-engineer’ aspects of them and reduce project scope to fit a budget. It might be cheaper plumbing fixtures or wall finishes, something innocuous, but if they can put less shutoff valves in med gas lines and save $75k, they’ll do it even if it makes a potential future expansion much more difficult.

Money rules everything, even the most important things.

Then followed it up with
 
 

Apcom WAMJHJ-8125MNG
in  other words the cheapest managed 8 port 2.5G + one 10G switch money can buy. So generic the web interface is labeled "switch" without the company name mentioned. 

 
 
Some 3d-printing upgrades:
- 80W heater cartridges for one of the toolchanger to get quicker from standby to active temp; reducing print time.
- BTT RRF wifi to add the duet web interface to the SKR v1.3
- Mellow fly RRF E3 mainboard/controller: Transitioning the last printer (from Marlin) to RRF ("duet" firmware).
 
Surprised to win an auction for a BCN3D Sigma for around $100.  Very exciting as this will be my first IDEX (independent dual printhead) printer.

Then followed it up with
 
 

Cowboy Bebop on blu ray